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Polonsky made it a year of musical `firsts'

"What do you think of Celine Dion?" asks singer/songwriter Jonny Polonsky in the middle of a question-and-answer session that is supposed to focus on him and what makes him tick -- but has drifted inexplicably to, er, French-Canadian pop divas.

But leave it to Polonsky to make even the most routine interview quirky. As irreverent and exuberant on the phone as he is on his debut album "Hi My Name Is Jonny," Polonsky has a fresh take on pop music, recording, touring and interviewing because he's pretty new to them himself.

Interviews, the bane of many a pop musician's existence, provide Polonsky with another outlet to amuse himself. He actually enjoys them -- with a few exceptions. He explained: "Sometimes they get a bit monotonous, and some interviewers aren't all that great. Somebody basically asked me if I was a loser once. He didn't come out and say it like that, but he said that there's this common misconception that I just sit around and record myself, that I'm just this lonely, bedroom-ridden rocker or whatever."

The media has made a lot out of the fact that Polonsky wrote, played, recorded and produced the album entirely by himself in his brother's bedroom in Chicago. That, combined with the romantic, wistful nature of songs, such as "Gone Away" and "Love Lovely Love," lead to notions of Polonsky as a creative recluse, a myth that he's eager to dispel. "A lot of the songs on the record are love songs, and a handful of them are kind of forlorn, so I'm seen as some kind of forlorn dude," Polonsky said with a sigh. "But that's just a handful of songs I've written out of maybe 30 or 40, at a specific time in my life. I'm a pretty happy guy."

And if anything can smash the perception of Polonsky as a forlorn dude, it's his love for touring -- another first. Opening for one of his musical heroes, ex-Pixies frontman Frank Black, has been nothing short of a great time for him. "It's been really fun. The guys that I've got playing for me are old friends that I've known for quite awhile and played with under different circumstances over the years, but this is the first time that we've played my music. It's a real band, a power trio," he said.

And if Polonsky seems a little too enthusiastic to be true, consider what he was doing before he became a critic's darling and the freshest purveyor of pure pop: "I worked in an ex-nuclear power plant in Watertown (Mass.) xeroxing Army files. It was awful! It was all just babbling army nonsense," he recalled with a shudder.

"Hi My Name is Jonny" reflects that bouyant feeling of freedom that Polonsky felt when he finally quit working at the plant to concentrate on his music. Songs like "Half Mind" and "Gone Away" have a bouncy, immediate quality to them that make them seem like discoveries on each listen. While Polonsky's own discovery wasn't so immediate, it's certainly dramatic.

He gave some of his demo tapes to Tin Machine guitarist Reeves Gabrels, who gave them to none other than Frank Black. Impressed, Black helped Polonsky with a more polished demo. And, Polonsky explained, "Frank got me a manager. The tape that I made with Frank got me signed and got Rick Rubin's (the president of Black's and Polonsky's record label, American) attention." He laughed, "It's always good to have the big man on your side, to have the president behind you."

But with songs like Polonsky's, it's hard to imagine Rubin not backing him. "Hi My Name is Jonny" bursts with simple, affecting yet unaffected pop like "Love Lovely Love" and "I Don't Know What to Dream at Night." Ironically, Polonsky occasionally has trouble coming up with these artless tunes: "Sometimes the words and everything just come out really easily, but some songs take a lot more cajoling. I guess my biggest problem is with lyrics. A lot of the songs I write deal with relationships, but now I want to try different things. I just gotta do what I gotta do, as long as it sounds true to myself," he said.

Right now, remaining true to himself means setting up in Chicago to record his new material as soon as possible -- right after he gets off this tour, as a matter of fact. "Hopefully by then I'll have all my equipment that I've ordered in town, and all I'll have to do is rent an apartment and set up. Realistically, by June I'll be able to start recording. I'll just have to take some time to learn how to use the gear. Hopefully I'll get the record done this summer. That's my goal," he said with that enthusiasm that has carried him so far so quickly. After a year of musical firsts, Polonsky's new projects are bound to be second to none.